Who was the first transgender person? |
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Who was the first transgender person? – Dexter, age 11, Las Vegas, Nevada
Who was the first transgender person? – Dexter, age 11, Las Vegas, Nevada
Imagine you have a time machine, and you can travel back to any civilization in history. Maybe you’d go back to ancient Athens, or to a monastery in the Middle Ages. Or you could mingle with Hittite warriors before battle in Bronze Age Anatolia, in what is now Turkey.
In all of these times and places, you’d see differences between people that you would understand as men and women, generally speaking. You’d see a variety of clothing, hairstyles, body shapes and other indicators of gender in these different cultures.
But if you asked anyone you met in these time periods what is essential to being a man or a woman, or whether a man could become a woman and vice versa, or whether there was any kind of human besides men and women, you’d get different answers depending on whom you asked.
And not only would a medieval monk in the 13th century respond differently from a Hittite warrior from 2,500 years earlier, but even within a single city, people with different jobs, social roles or ways of thinking might answer differently.
The interesting thing is that wherever there is evidence of gender boundaries in ancient societies, there is evidence of people crossing those boundaries. In fact, as long as there have been humans, there have been people whom we would call transgender today.
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